MacLean said the group is not only concentrating on protecting education, but also on issues such as the prevention of Medicaid expansion and proposed changes to voting laws.

“All of the different things they are doing will harm the recovery in the state now, but will also set us back for generations to come,” she said.

MacLean said the group enables scholars to share their research knowledge and expertise on issues to better inform the public.

According to the group’s website, 18 of 65 affiliates are from UNC.

Hodding Carter III, a public policy professor at UNC who spoke at the forum but is not listed as an affiliate, said he is discouraged by state Republicans who treat education like a punching bag.

“They wish to stop what seems to them, and to many, a deliberate bleeding of vitality from our education,” Carter said. “They are killing the goose that laid the golden egg, which is education.”

But Jay Schalin, director of state policy analysis at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative think tank in Raleigh, said he was surprised at the some aggressive comments.

“I thought that in some cases many of the comments were unbecoming of scholars,” he said. “They were hurling around rhetoric that was false. They were pretty much demonizing rather than engaging in any sort of reasonable discourse.”

Schalin said at one point, one of the professors at the panel said Republicans were driven by ideology but Democrats were not.

MacLean said the group is planning more events to follow last week’s forum.

“This is not a flash in the pan effort,” she said. “We are actively planning other events in Western and Eastern North Carolina. We do see it as a movement that will hopefully develop across the state.”